Captain Cook and loyalty in sport

Simon Barnes in Cricinfo

If England want to reach the World Cup quarter-finals, they are more likely to do it without Cook, but dropping him would be disloyal © Getty Images

Loyalty is seen as one of sport's cardinal virtues - even though calculated disloyalty is sometimes a shatteringly effective tactic. Take Jimmy Greaves. A great footballer, but the England manager Alf Ramsey showed him no loyalty and dropped him in the course of the World Cup of 1966, preferring Geoff Hurst. Hurst scored a hat-trick in the final, Greaves became an alcoholic.

Yet there are times when loyalty counts. During that same tournament, so dear to the English mind, there were calls from British politicians to drop Nobby Stiles because of his "dirty" play - and people in the Football Association thought they had a point. But Ramsey said he'd resign if ordered to drop Stiles. Stiles stayed, was destructive and brilliant, and England won the tournament.

Loyalty, then, is an equivocal thing, in sport as in anything else. Loyalty isn't a virtue plain and simple: it depends on what - and whom - you are loyal to. Liverpool Football Club made a great show of their loyalty to their forward Luis Suarez when he was accused of racism. Suarez was found guilty and Liverpool's loyalty looked like self-serving parochialism.

Indian cricket remained loyal to Sachin Tendulkar and indulged him right to the end. Would it have been wiser, kinder, more dignified to have moved him on while he had that gloriously imperfect - and Bradmanesque - 99 international centuries to his name? Instead of waiting until he had scored his 100th, inevitably in a losing cause against Bangladesh? In the last couple of seasons Tendulkar lost some of his poetry.

This year English cricket has been all about loyalty. I'm not saying this as a fanciful observer: loyalty was the agenda set by those who run the English game. It's as if they had determined that cricket should become a morality play, one in which the good end happily and the bad unhappily.

But they haven't. Good and bad look equally unhappy.

Perhaps they thought that loyalty was a simple issue. If so, they have been sadly disabused. Poor old Alastair Cook: it was never his ambition to be a symbol of righteousness. He just wanted to play cricket and score runs, and for a while he was immensely good at it.

	Be very careful before you get moral in public. Especially in sport. Runs are not the reward for good behaviour. Nasty men can also score centuries

But they forced him into the role of Captain Loyal: compare and contrast with Kevin Pietersen, Batsman Vile. Pietersen was sacked for various crimes of disloyalty, despite being England's top scorer in their disastrous tour of Australia last winter.

They couldn't just drop him: they wanted Pietersen publicly disgraced. Accordingly, they staked everything on Cook as Pietersen's antithesis: hero to Pietersen's antihero; quiet, composed and decent where Pietersen is loud, rude and self-advertising; generous and team-minded where Pietersen is self-obsessed; above all loyal where Pietersen is disloyal.

A lot of that is a pretty good fit, but this is sport, not politics, and in sport you can't get by on bluster and good intentions. Cook is a batsman and a batsman needs runs. Cook at his best is one of the most certain players who ever took guard. But the traumas of the winter made that certainty a thing of shreds and patches.

He began to rebuild his life post Ashes, post KP. He was greatly helped by India's feeble performance in last summer's Test series, but now, as cricket gets ready for the World Cup early next year, the question of loyalty crops up once again.

For Cook is having a disastrous series against Sri Lanka. England haven't a clue about 50-over cricket, never have; beneath their dignity, I suppose. Cook's attempts to be a one-day batsman mix Dad-dancing embarrassment with Candide-like naiveté. And he has scored no runs.

So England are in a difficult situation. When does it become appropriate to be disloyal to Captain Loyal? Ex-players are saying it's time he was dropped as both captain and player from the one-day team. The most intriguing argument, from the Guardian's Mike Selvey, is that his scrappy one-day batting has removed the certainty from his Test match play.

The irrefragable fact is that Cook is not good enough as either batsman or captain in the 50-over game. If England want to put on a respectable show at the World Cup - i.e. reach the quarter-finals - they are more likely to do it without Cook. But dropping him would be rather disloyal, and this is a team that is flamboyantly built on loyalty.

Eoin Morgan, Cook's likely replacement, is in equally poor batting form © Getty Images

Naturally the players are showing public loyalty to Cook: strong man, difficult patch, got the character to pull through etc etc. But that's their job; they are not going to say: Well, Cookie's struggling, I think I ought to do the job instead.

In sport, as in politics, looking loyal is the default position.

The selectors are now wondering about the cost of public disloyalty. So here's some advice: don't do it unless you have a plausible alternative. Don't drop Bradley Wiggins as your main man in the Tour de France unless you have Chris Froome already in the team. Team Sky were bold enough to risk such disloyalty, and that's how they won the event in 2012 and then 2013.

And here's some more advice. Pity it comes too late, really: be very careful before you get moral in public. Especially in sport. You have to accept that runs are not the reward for good behaviour. And that nasty men can also score centuries. It's also true that a person whose nature is fundamentally disloyal can do a fine job for a team. There's something offensive about the very idea but every team that has even known success has experienced it to some degree. Certainly England have.

But if not Cook, who? Eoin Morgan is the obvious choice, but he can't buy a run either and looks like a busted flush. No point in being publicly disloyal to Captain Loyal - and finding yourself even worse off. So here's the moral: sport may be a minefield but it's not half as explosive as morality.

How much talent does the difficult player need?

Exceptionally gifted but unreliable players are often given lots of rope by management, but far too many seem to believe themselves to be deserving of that leeway

Ed Smith

May 20, 2014

 

	It's no surprise that Shane Warne was able to criticise Australia coach John Buchanan and not be dropped for it © Getty Images  Enlarge

It's been a mixed week for sportsmen out of love with the authorities. Michael Carberry, overlooked after the Ashes tour, publicly stated his frustrations about a lack of communication from the selectors. Many assumed that Carberry, aged 33, had signed his own death warrant and would never play for England again. But the selectors have made a shrewd decision in recalling him. He is a decent, understated man; the England management now looks magnanimous in overlooking a few surprising quotes in a newspaper.

No such luck for Samir Nasri, the wonderfully gifted but moody French footballer. He has been left out of France's World Cup squad. France's coach, Didier Deschamps, explained his decision with bracing honesty: "He's a regular starter at Manchester City. That's not the case today with the France team. And he also said he's not happy when he's a substitute. I can tell you that you can feel it in the squad." Deschamps went further, anticipating his critics by conceding that Nasri was more talented than some players he had selected: "It's not necessarily the 23 best French players, but it's the best squad in my eyes to go as far as possible in this competition."

Talent v unity: an old story.

Rugby union, though, has also brought two mavericks back into the fold. Gavin Henson, Wales' troubled but mercurial playmaker, looks set to return to the red jersey. And England's Danny Cipriani, another flair player who has never found a happy home wearing national colours, has been thrown a lifeline. A last chance that both Henson and Cipriani cannot afford to miss? I bet they have heard that before. And then been handed just one final, last chance. That's often the way with rare talent: different rules apply.

As always, these debates have generally descended into an argument about abstract principles. Pundits have rushed to say that French football has a problem with finding a home for left-field characters. Other have bridled at Deschamps' logic: who should be happy being put on the bench anyway? It is the job of managers, we are often told, to finesse and handle talented but unconventional personalities. Indeed, with a moment's reflection, anyone can produce a list of world-beating players who didn't conform to a coach's template for a model professional - from Diego Maradona to Andrew Flintoff.

Such a list, sadly, proves absolutely nothing. Because it is just as easy to find examples of teams that began a winning streak by leaving out a talented but unreliable star player. The French team that won the World Cup in 1998 left out both David Ginola and Eric Cantona, just as the current side have now omitted Nasri.

In the popular imagination, the argument about dropping and recalling star players revolves around the juicy, gossipy questions: how difficult are they, how does their awkwardness manifest itself, has anyone tried to talk them round? This is naturally intriguing stuff. But the other half of the question - the crucial half - is too often ignored. Quite simply, how much better are they than the next guy?

	When mavericks slide from outright brilliance to mere high competence they find patience runs out alarmingly quickly. There is a lot of high competence around. It is replaceable. Not so genuine brilliance

If you are a lot better, it is amazing how forgiving sports teams can be. Luis Suarez was banned for eight games for racially abusing Patrice Evra. He then served another ten-match ban for biting a Chelsea player. Obviously Liverpool sacked him instantly on the grounds that he was bringing the club into disrepute and becoming a distraction from the task of winning football matches? No, they didn't do anything of the kind. They calculated that Suarez was the best chance, their only chance, of mounting a challenge for trophies. If Suarez had been Liverpool's sixth- or seventh-best player, rather than their star man, he would have been kicked out years ago.

In other words, the best protection from being dropped for being "difficult" is to be brilliant. Even as a young man, England midfielder Paul Gascoigne was a heavy drinker and an unreliable man. But he was a sensational footballer. Coaches put up with him because they calculated it was in their own and the team's rational self-interest. By the latter stages of his career, Gascoigne was still a heavy drinker and an unreliable man, but he was now only occasionally an excellent footballer. Glenn Hoddle felt Gascoigne was too unfit to play at the 1998 World Cup. The glass was half-empty.

When mavericks slide from outright brilliance to mere high competence they find patience runs out alarmingly quickly. There is a lot of high competence around. It is replaceable. Not so genuine brilliance. That is why Shane Warne was able to criticise Australia coach John Buchanan and (nearly) always stay in the team. Any rational man who asked himself the question: "Are Australia a better team with Warne in it?" came to the unavoidable conclusion: "Yes, definitely."

Here's the central point. At this exalted level of elite sport, a great number of players have an epic degree of self-belief. Being convinced of their own greatness is an aspect of their magic. They back themselves to shape the match, to determine its destiny - especially the big matches. Instead of seeing themselves as just one of a number of exceptionally talented players, in their own minds they are men apart, special cases.

They aren't always right, though. So the question becomes: how good, how difficult? They are two aspects of the same equation, a calculation that is being made every day by coaches all over the world - on the school pitch, in the reserves squad, all the way to the World Cup final.

A player, too, must make his own calculation. Would pretending to be someone else - a more compliant, easy-going man - centrally detract from my performances? Must I play on my own terms, behaving as I like? But this question must coexist with another, less comfortable one: am I good enough to get away with it?

Not many. Fewer, certainly, than the number who think they can.

Cheating isn’t cheating if you don’t think it is

Luis Suárez's handball: Cheating isn’t cheating if you don’t think it is

Football is only a reflection of that society - and that doesn't say much about us

Mark Steel in The Independent

Luis Suárez should be given a job in the Cabinet. He’s the footballer who’s been called a cheat, after he handled the ball just before scoring a goal for Liverpool in the FA Cup, and experts are undecided as to how he should be dealt with. And you can see the difficulty, because with such a brazen attitude towards cheating, he ought to be running one of our major institutions.

Suárez appears to have grasped how society’s rules have changed. Under the old system, if you cheated you hoped you weren’t caught. Now you don’t mind getting caught, you just announce that cheating isn’t really breaking any rules, and carry on. Football is only a reflection of that society.

So in his next match, Suárez could place the ball in a Sherman tank and drive it through the goal, flanked by marines who assassinate the opposing goalkeeper. His manager would say, “I can’t comment as I didn’t see the incident, but his first touch was astounding”. Match of the Day would debate whether the commandos were interfering with play. And after he’d scored 60 goals this way, the Football Association would set up an inquiry, in which Suárez would say he couldn’t recall ever playing football in his life. The inquiry would propose a limit on the number of tanks in each half but this wouldn’t be implemented as Suárez would be outraged at the restrictions on his freedom.

Or he could learn from the Deputy Prime Minister, by pledging to abolish handball at all times in every way, including by the goalkeeper, with fines for anyone who even carries the ball to the ground. And then spend the next match throwing balls in the goal, before announcing: “I’m really, really sorry to have made such a foolish promise. I’m sure you’ll understand that from now on I’m going to do this in every match.”

Maybe the first part of each footballer’s training now is to study the banks. The coach says: “This lot were caught bringing the whole economic system down, but did they bother looking sheepish? No, they insisted on an extra bonus as it would be even harder clearing up the mess than it was causing it. If they can do that after causing a global recession, you can do it after diving in the box.”

As the attitude towards cheating is so similar in different fields, football pundits should be regular guests on the news. So Alan Shearer could say: “You can see from this angle, the police have definitely falsified 116 documents, but the ref hasn’t blown the whistle so they’ve got away with it.”

Some commentators suggested that Suárez should have owned up to his foul, but with the modern rules, even if he’d announced on the Tannoy, “I punched that ball in the goal ha ha ha”, the referee would have let it stand, but suggested at some point in the future someone should set up a self-regulating body made up of prominent figures from the handballing community.